Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Staunton, February 2 – Although in
the case of occupied Crimea, Vladimir Putin has talked about the need for the
full rehabilitation of the peoples of that peninsula who suffered under Soviet
rule, the Kremlin leader on Sunday quietly took a step that deprives the ethnic
Germans of the Russian Federation of their hopes that they will ever get such
treatment.

On the one hand, the timing of this
action is a reflection of deteriorating relations between Moscow and Berlin.
But on the other, it is completely consistent with Putin’s actions if not his
words about non-Russian minorities and about respecting their rights regardless
of the Russian Constitution or measures adopted under his predecessor Boris
Yeltsin.

Putin excluded the words in the
Yeltsin decree about the restoration of statehood “as one of the means of the rehabilitation
of the people. In another paragraph, ‘the restoration of statehood’ was
replaced by ‘the social-economic and ethno-cultural development of the Russian
Germans.”

In addition, by his actions, Putin “changed
the name of the inter-governmental commission overseeing Russian German issues.
It had been called “the Russian-German Commission for the Preparation of a
Joint Program of Measures for Securing the Gradual Restoration of the Statehood
of Russian Germans.”

Now that body will be called “the
Russian-German Commission for Russian German Issues.”

Between 1918 and 1941, the Russian
Germans had their own ethnic autonomy. But on August 28, 1941, following Hitler’s
invasion of the USSR, Stalin disbanded that political entity, accused the
roughly 400,000 ethnic Germans of being spies and diversionist, and deported
them en masse to Kazakhstan.

As part of Nikita Khrushchev’s
de-Stalinization campaign, Moscow on August 28, 1964, declared that the charges
against the Russian Germans were without foundation and thus “rehabilitated
them.” But a few weeks later, Khrushchev was overthrown and the Russian Germans
had to wait until the end of the Soviet Union to renew their quest for justice.

In February 1992, many of them – who
then numbered approximately as many as had been deported 51 years earlier –
believed they were close to achieving their goal with Yeltsin’s decree. But
they made little progress in the intervening years, and now Putin has slammed
the door to progress, at least as long as he is in office.